At Cineplex Entertainment, it's the movies that draw the crowds. But it's the popcorn and soda that drives Cineplex's profits.

So a key strategy for the Toronto-based company is to drum up more sales to large businesses, whose special events and corporate gift-card programs funnel traffic to the theaters' highly profitable concessions.

Until recently, the $800 million USD chain of 133 theaters relied on a strictly manual system for pursuing prospects. Trade show leads, for example, wound up in spreadsheets or contact lists. "There might be someone who'd follow up or send an e-mail," says CTO Jeffrey Kent. "But the tracking of what happened to the e-mail wasn't there. It was a matter of trying to remember what had been sent."

This fall, Cineplex installed customer relationship management (CRM) software that has empowered the company's people to close more deals. Recognizing that some CRM systems are so hard to use that people ignore them, Cineplex opted for a system that uses the same Office interface that workers already understand. Now less time is spent on the mechanics of CRM and more on business strategy. "We spend more effort on generating a better quality e-mail that goes out to validate the prospects and then capturing the data coming back in," says Kent. "We're dealing a lot better with leads generated at trade shows and converting them to theater rentals, gift cards, and gift certificates."

After years of making do with homegrown tracking systems or cumbersome enterprise CRM systems that are often shelved, sales and marketing professionals have a new generation of software that suits their style and frees them to new levels of productivity. Long plagued by hard-to-use features, CRM software now integrates with major desktop tools used by everyday office people. That means users spend less time creating new campaigns and more time optimizing existing ones profitably and as a result deepening customer relationships.

And just in the nick of time.

CRM's path towards renewal mirrors an equally dramatic shift that has occurred in business. The "control-the-message" mantra that marketing departments relied on for decades has been rendered mute by the rise of the blogosphere, online communities, audiocasts, and YouTube.

Control is out; users are in—and on their own terms. "The corporate ecosystem has become a customer ecosystem, and that has changed how companies have to view the customer," says Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light and president of The 56 Group, LLC, a Manassas, Virginia, enterprise applications consulting firm. "You have to start thinking about the customer in a different way now that they hold the keys to the kingdom."

As a result, the nature of the customer experience has been altered. For one thing, IT's role has grown as technology drives more of the productivity gains (see chart, "IT Challenges to Delivering a Superior Customer Experience"). For another, marketing's role has undergone a sea change.

"Marketing's job had been to go out and say 'here's why our products are better than the other companies,'" says Greenberg. "Now they have to become the front line for customer engagement. It's their job to say 'We want to work and collaborate with you so you have the appropriate tools to stay with us.'"

At the same time, executive teams are demanding a much greater level of accountability from marketing people. This is especially true in the consumer packaged goods sector, where according to Rob Bois, research director for Boston-based AMR Research, as much as 20 percent of revenues are used to drive marketing programs. That new scrutiny is an important driver in CRM's resurgence.

"Marketing has been more art than science. CRM is bucking that trend by introducing more science into the equation," says Bois. "The question now is did a campaign influence a lift in sales? And was it a profitable lift? Marketing managers are coming to the realization that they need to prove their effectiveness."

Sales, on the other hand, has always been a numbers game. Reps run their campaigns, calculate proposals, tweak numbers, and if all goes well, happily exceed their quotas. Right? Only partly. Sales reps, like their brethren in marketing, have traditionally been content to use software they're familiar with, which has meant standalone desktop tools. The sales pipeline's visibility has often been limited to information shared by e-mail messages and attachments.

Altering those work habits has proven a challenge. "How do you get a sales rep to reliably enter information about opportunities, close dates, and who they're talking to as a normal part of their work?" asks Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "CRM has struggled with that because people had to stop what they're doing and call up the CRM program. I call it 'Alt-Tab-CRM.'"

The newest generation of CRM changes all that. Rather than require sales and marketing to learn new software, it quietly ferries information that has been entered into favorite software programs and deposits it in CRM databases and applications. From there, the information benefits not only sales, but many other people throughout the organization, including customer support, product development, and marketing.

Perhaps most important, these more friendly and familiar CRM tools help sales and marketing people to work together. "Bringing collaboration into CRM is something we're seeing more, pushing the sales lead to the next stage of the pipeline," says Rebecca Wettemann, vice president for Nucleus Research, Wellesley, Massachusetts. "We're also seeing more innovation in analytics in CRM. Marketing can say 'this is the campaign I'm sending out because I've run the numbers.'"

Field reps and marketing coordinators, for example, share real-time information on the sales pipeline. Not only does everyone have visibility into where prospects are in the sales cycle, but predictive modeling features help by flagging at-risk accounts. For example, predictive modeling can identify which customers with soon-to-expire contracts have shown little activity in the last six months and may be planning to leave.

Kent says Cineplex Entertainment plans to roll out the CRM application to other departments of the company "so we can share the information and understand the whole company's relationship with customers instead of each department understanding only their part of it."

Now that's a blockbuster hit.

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